ADELINA KRUPSKI

FILM STUDIES

NOVEMBER 24, 2006

After World War Two, the French culture reacted to its country’s state of political and financial exhaustion by falling back to old, pre-war popular traditions, thus becoming more concerned with consumption and leisure than with politics. One of these traditions was classical French film which continued throughout the 1950s and beyond. However, beginning 1959, France saw the rise of a new generation of filmmakers, which developed into the Nouvelle Vague, or “New Wave.” The term Nouvelle Vague, originally coined by Franoise Giroud to refer to the new socially active youth class, soon became associated with then-current cinematic trends, mainly as a result of producers’ desire for work by young people. The popularity of the New Wave corresponded with the political culture in which it found itself, and with the most politically tense moments in France’s post-war history. The period from 1958 to 1962 “coincided with the radical effect on institutions of the advent of the Fifth Republic and its new constitution which invested the presidency with executive powers - giving the president virtually supreme power over the parliament.” Though largely non-political, New Wave filmmakers carried on the 1930s tradition of criticizing, at times lampooning, the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, a number of historical, technological and economic factors, such as the introduction of a film subsidy from government, enabled many unknowns to get their first chance at directing. The ‘avance sur recettes’ system, funded by a levy on ticket sales and repayable by a percentage of the film’s takings, financed first features on the basis of a script. A group of dynamic critics from the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, which attacked classical virtues of 1940s French cinema such as literary scripts, smooth photography, and elegant décor, took advantage of the opportunity and, as a result, as many as one-hundred directors, including Jacques Rivette, Franois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, made their first full-length films between 1958 and 1961.

These early films had in common “a casual approach to the ‘rules’ of mainstream cinema, a freer editing style, and loosely constructed scenarios.” Conflicting with the fluid, studio-bound cinematography of the contemporary commercial film, New Wave directors shot on location, using portable equipment, natural lighting, little-known actors, improvised plot and dialogue, small crews, and natural sound, directly recorded with portable tape machines that were electronically synchronized with the camera. Consequently, the films, made quickly and inexpensively, had a very distinctive style. For instance, Agns Varda’s La Pointe demonstrates these practices, along with deliberate distanciation in order to prevent spectator identification, no rigorous sense of chronology or classic narrative, subversion of genres, counterpoint and a disorientating editing style. New Wave directors, however, did not make low budget films in order to make a quick profit. Rather, since they had an essential independence from the industry, this was the only possible way for the producers to make films of any kind. In relation to type of cinema that preceded it, the New Wave was revolutionary both on the narrative and visual level. In relation to narrative, films of this era commonly portrayed incomplete or unrealistic stories, with no beginning, middle or end. “More often it was a slice of life…There were no stars. The time was the ‘now-ever-present’ of the 1960s. Discourses were contemporary and about young people.” Visually, the New Wave took apart conventional methods, such as the use of establishing shots to orientate the spectator in terms of space and time, as well the smooth and faultless style of editing. In addition, two other features, though more technological, provided New Wave cinema with its sense of spontaneity; namely the lightweight camera, ordinarily used in television studios, and the fast and inexpensive film stock.

Greatly influential, Cahiers du Cinema consisted of young men who loved film but could not become filmmakers because of the inaccessibility of the French commercial cinema. However, as their experience of actual viewing made them more knowledgeable about film than any other generation in history, they became critics and theorists. As the first film-educated generation of filmmakers in history, the young directors “knew more about the medium as an art form and less about the practical aspects of production than anyone who had ever made films before them.” As a result, they made many mistakes. However, these mistakes constitute the technical characteristics observed in New Wave films. For example, the directors used jump cuts, or disruptions of continuity, as a means of restoring botched scenes by cutting out mistakes from the middle of a take, as well as a way of creating perceptual dislocation in the audience. The two basic principles of the Cahiers critics, personal authorship and ‘mise-en-scne’, explain a great deal about the New Wave style. First, personal authorship, or ‘the auteur theory,’ states that filmmakers should put forward a coherent world-view in their films and demonstrate a uniquely individual style. This belief in communicating a personal vision arose from the idea that film “was an art form that could provide an artist with a medium of personal expression as rich, as varied, and as sensitive as any other.” However, according to New Wave filmmakers, film was not reaching its full potential because of the narrative conventions from the 1930s and 1940s, which they soon destroyed. Their determination to elaborate an audiovisual language is implied in the second principle, ‘mise-en-scne,’ which has to do with creating mood and ambience or, more literally, structuring the film through camera placement and movement, blocking of action, direction of actors and so on. According to this notion, a film has the ability to do more than simply tell a story through a series of meaningful images, and should be an experience that engages the mind and senses. “Integral to the concept of mise-en-scne is the notion that film should be not merely an intellectual or rational experience but an emotional and psychological one as well.” New Wave directors try to establish aesthetic distance between the audience and the film in order to remind the audience that it is watching a film. “This is because New Wave cinema is, in a sense, self-reflexive cinema, or meta-cinema - film about the process and nature of film itself.”

Four films released in 1959 and 1960 caused the first impact from the New Wave. First, two films by Claude Chabrol, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, focused on the gap between rural and urban life in the new France. Next, The 400 Blows, by Franois Truffaut, tells the story of a boy who becomes a thief and a runaway. Finally, Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless portrays the last days of a petty criminal. New Wave filmmakers often built their plots around chance events and digressive episodes, intensified the art-cinema convention of the open-ended narrative and referred systematically to prior film traditions. For example, Breathless, worked on in collaboration with Chabrol and Truffaut, has a fairly straightforward plot, which is based on the conventions of the American gangster movie. In short, the ‘hero’ in the film, an amoral thug on the run who models himself on Humphrey Bogart, is disclosed to the police by his American girlfriend. As one of the first financially successful New Wave films, it is also the most characteristic and influential. It can easily be recognized as New Wave in its hand-held camerawork, jerky editing, and homages to Jean-Pierre Melville and Monogram B pictures. According to James Monaco, “it is a film about film noirs”. Godard’s style, dominated by jump cuts and mismatches between scenes, provided a complete contrast to the conventional practice of the day. One of his most influential innovations was to design shots that look surprisingly flat. Godard, “is the inaugurator of a new beauty that is the beginning of modern cinema - uncomposed, but snapped. Movements observed, transformed by being watched.” Similarly to Truffaut’s other early films, The 400 Blows was an autobiographical film stylistically characterized by the use of zoom shots, choppy editing, casual compositions and bursts of quirky humour or sudden violence. In addition, Truffaut represented the contrast between freedom and confinement through motion and stasis. When filming scenes on location in Paris, the camera moves constantly, tracking and panning. On the other hand, when filming closed interior scenes, the camera mainly stays static. A brief look at just a couple of directors and examples of their work reveals the extreme amount of diversity in style and technique that came about during the New Wave movement.

In conclusion, the French New Wave had a tremendous impact on international cinema. Not only did it allow a variety of young filmmakers to emerge, whether beginning as theorists and critics or as assistants and editors, and produce films with a completely new style, but it also changed the scope of film itself, establishing it as a medium capable of communicating different views of the world through its audiovisual language. Most importantly, as a result of the huge influx of filmmakers into the industry, the inexpensive, lightweight camera became effective, useful and accessible to everyone, allowing previously unnoticed voices to be heard. Finally, New Wave directors were very successful, especially considering the low budgets and simple equipment at their disposal, while their achievements went far beyond the bounds of a simple reaction against the formulaic mainstream convention of the 1950s.